Sounds like a weird combination? It sure is. Yes, in this blog post I will be writing about cooking and food… and aquarium fish. Weird.

This past weekend we hosted a dinner party for our friends Liv and Rob, who we always have a fantastic time with. We decided to make a three-course meal, but didn’t try anything new since we were under some time constraints for cooking.

It’s strange, I’ve gone from being a cocktail-only person, to being a maybe-sometimes-champagne person, to appreciating both wine and champagne now. I guess I have my friend Crista to blame for that! We had quite the array of drinks on Saturday, and I was surprised the next morning to see how much we had really consumed.

I prepared the tiramisu the night before, but everything else we cooked fresh the day of. It wasn’t quite dinner theatre… we were scrambling around the kitchen in front of our guests. But I think overall it was a success!

For the appetizer we had a roasted creamy butternut squash soup with fresh cream, shaved parmigiano reggiano, chopped chives, and freshly grated nutmeg. Click here for my butternut squash soup recipe.

For the main we had beef shortrib braised in Barolo red wine, served over a bed of fresh pappardelle pasta noodles with pine nuts, spinach, chanterelle mushrooms, and parmigiano reggiano cream sauce. Click here for my braised beef short rib and pappardelle recipe.

For our sweet finish, we had my cheesecake tiramisu with strawberries and espresso wafers. The tiramisu had lady fingers soaked in Kahlua, coffee, coffee liqueur, and chocolate liqueur. Click here for my cheesecake tiramisu recipe.

The dinner party was probably a little too fun.

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On a completely other note, we bought some new discus for our aquarium! I am really as I have always wanted more discus in the tank and finally was able to convince Allan over the past year or so to be open to more discus.

We bought four new discus fish, for a total of five now in our tank. We got a Golden Master, Red Melon, Red Turquoise, and Tiger Snake Skin to add to our Red Dragon (the larger one we’ve had for almost a year now). I absolutely love them! Now we have to name them…

What did you get up to over the weekend?

I love relaxing weekends in Vancouver. Sometimes the best weekends are spent at home.

My favourite moment was Allan and I spontaneously dancing in the middle of our living room together for absolutely no reason. Other good moments include playing 9 holes of golf at Westwood Plateau (Academy course) with Trev and Tom, doing yoga every night together before bed, and of course… visiting the fish store.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Allan and I are slowly putting the work into building our fish tank into an aquascape. The first step is of course to get the right lightning (check), CO2 going (check), and the right water conditions for the plants and the fish (in progress). After that, it’s a matter of designing what you want your ‘scape to look like, picking out the right fish and plants, and making sure you can keep everything alive! Definitely not easy at all.

It’s worth it though. It’s like a moving piece of art.

So we stopped by our favourite fish store, Big Al’s, to pick up a couple new plants and some new fish.

Here’s a shot of our work-in-progress tank. As you can see, pretty bare on plants and way too much algae.

We bought a Red Dragon Discus… I’ve always wanted Discus fish in our tank, but they are tricky to keep happy and need specific conditions. I think we’ve finally got the right set up, and the Discus so far seems to be fitting into the community. It’s a gorgeous fish, somewhat expensive, but very much worth it. The red pattern really stands out in the tank. Over time, as the Discus matures, it will start to develop iridescent blue in its fins to complement the red colouring. Very excited! Nickname: Disco Stu.

We also got 2 new bunches of Rangeri Sword plants. We’d like to eventually fill the back wall with them. Some more plants will hopefully keep the algae levels down a bit more.

We also picked up 2 Golden Rams… really beautiful fish, but difficult to keep alive. We’re hoping they will grow big in the tank because that gorgeous yellow colour would be a nice addition.

We’ve been having a serious algae problem ever since we added the new light (as you can see in some of the photos), so we purchased 4 Siamese algae eaters. We were pretty skeptical that they would make any difference at all… and had been warned that they would do well with our red-tipped shark… but so far they seem to be faring well. And miraculously… they are actually eating the algae!

Here they are in action chowing down on our algae.. we couldn’t believe it!

A side profile of some of the new fish in the tank… very excited!

Although we are still quite a ways from the aquascape we want, we are making good progress and are really loving the new fish already!